Blecher foresaw the irreality of the “real” world and the substance of “irreality,” now main quandaries of our time as we struggle between the “real” and the “virtual.”
“One day the cinema caught fire. The film tore and immediately went up in flames, which for several seconds raged on the screen like a filmed warning that the place was on fire as well as a logical continuation of the medium’s mission to give the news, which mission it was now carrying out to perfection by reporting the latest and most exciting event in town: its own combustion. Cries of ‘Fire! Fire!’ broke out all over the room like revolver shots. In no time there was such a racket that the audience, until then seated quietly in the dark, seemed to have been storing up great wailing and ululation, like batteries, silent and inoffensive unless suddenly overcharged and then explosive.”
When hyper-realist ultra-hearing is so acutely accurate it becomes a timeless metaphor: “And suddenly a clicking noise rang out. It was neither the grate of sheet metal nor the far-off jangle of a bunch of keys nor the rasp of a motor; it was the click — easily discernable amidst the myriad everyday sounds — of the wheel of fortune.”
Like the fair, Blecher’s world is still a world in good order, loosely tethered to the nineteenth century’s long fin-de-siecle with its tendencies to dematerialize, slip away, and turn illegible. The educated classes of his time, who thought that “being illegible” was the greatest threat facing the human race, had no idea what a colossal loss of order was around the corner: the world and its humans would soon become illegible, unintelligible, irreparable. But Blecher’s senses saw far. He grasped the incoming scrambled text of matter, tuned to the disintegration of his body. The “adventures” of his evanescence are suspenseful, like those in a novel, beautiful like passages from a European, pessimistic Whitman, a Whitman à rebours, who is not Baudelaire, and these adventures are also news, our news.
There is no trace of God. But there is an ecstasy in knowing mud. And wonder at the fact that the world is full: “I was surrounded by hard, fixed matter on all sides — here in the form of balls and sculptures, outside in the form of trees, houses, and stone. Vast and willful, it held me in its thrall from head to foot. No matter where my thoughts led me, I was surrounded by matter, from my clothes to streams in the woods running through walls, rocks, glass. . I met hay carts and, now and then, extraordinary things, like a man in the rain carrying a chandelier with crystal ornaments that sounded like a symphony of hand bells on his back while heavy drops of rain dripped down the shiny facets. It made me wonder what constitutes the gravity of the world.”
It is the question that Michael Henry Heim — the great translator who brought into English some of Central Europe’s finest writers — heard in his own body. Heim was himself ill when he translated Blecher, for the sake of whom he learned Romanian. This translation is a special event in the complex geography of literature: it represents the meeting of a young Romanian genius racing the imminent destruction of his body, with Michael Heim, a master of the superb English sentence. Heim’s translation of Blecher’s Adventures in Irreality vibrates in tune with the mysterious filaments of death connecting them in this text. This is why, despite two decent previous translations into English, Heim’s Adventures in Immediate Irreality is definitive.
ANDREI CODRESCU
“Every Object Must Occupy the Place It Occupies and I Must Be the Person I Am”
I’d like to introduce you to a book, an impressive book that no one read when it first came out in Romania in 1936 or later when it was reissued in 1970: Adventures in Immediate Irreality by M. Blecher. And when the first German edition appeared, which wasn’t until 1990 in a translation by Ernest Wichner, no one read that either, even though few books published in Germany since 1990 could compare with Blecher’s novel for sheer literary intensity. But perhaps that’s why the book never attracted a wider audience?
In order to convince you, I’d like to let the book speak for itself.
“The crowds, making the rounds, would pass from zone to zone, bright lights to darkness, like the moon in my geography book” is how Blecher describes people visiting a fair. And no other sentence better describes his own text. The external plot isn’t easy to describe — it’s really the ongoing reflection of an interior narrative, a manic inner monologue written in the first person, in which the narrator’s striving for self-assurance becomes a confession. This narrator is a nameless adolescent roaming through the summer heat of a small town. He has no goal whatsoever, he is searching, as Blecher says, for the correspondence between himself and the waxwork panopticon of places, people, and objects set in the world. The search produces emotional upheavals that he calls crises, which all come from the “terrible question of who I actually am”—a question whose answer “requires a lucidity more basic and profound than that of the brain.” In the words of Blecher’s narrator: “And I have returned implacably to the surface of things. . Never, under no other circumstances, have I felt so clearly as in moments like these when every object must occupy the place it occupies and I must be the person I am.”
Places, persons, objects — and this vagabond narrator that speaks of himself so perplexingly and so intriguingly that it goes far beyond being “a complete stranger” to himself. Because what this person says about himself goes beyond what even a person might say who feels split into two persons. And his powers of observation are so ruthless it’s as though one person of flesh and blood were peering outside his body, along with a second person in his head, and along with a third or fifth person passing in and out of his own skin at will. Blecher’s protagonist turns the “crises” into a kind of equilibrium: “I was tall, thin, and pale. My spindly neck rose awkwardly out of my tunic. My long arms hung from my sleeves like newly skinned animals. My pockets so bulged with papers and objects that I could scarcely extract a handkerchief to wipe the dust off my shoes when I arrived in the ‘city center.’” And about a suicide attempt with over thirty white tablets he says: “Since nothing could go on as before, I had to make a clean break.” And: “It was as if it were an everyday task I needed to do. All I could find were things of no use to me: buttons, string, thread of various colors, notebooks — all strongly redolent of naphthalene and none capable of causing a man’s death.”
In the end, the happiness being sought culminates in catastrophe, which unfolds with drafting-table clarity but has obscure, inscrutable consequences. The lifeless material of objects and the vegetative matter of plants stimulate the nerves to the point of breaking. The “boundless melancholy” of the objects remains outside, while the brain is flooded with hallucinatory images: